OCEANOGRAPHY AND THE SEA

FISHERIES1

AT the last Cardiff meeting of the British Association in 1891 you had as your president the eminent astronomer Sir William Huggins, who discoursed upon the then recent discoveries of the spectroscope in relation to the chemical nature, density, temperature, pressure and even the motions of the stars. From the sky to the sea is a long drop; but the sciences of both have this, in common that they deal with fundamental principles and with vast numbers. Over three hundred years ago Spenser in the "Faerie Queene" compared "the seas abundant progeny " with "the starres on hy," and recent investigations show that a liter of sea-water may contain more than a hundred times as many living organisms as there are stars visible to the eye on a clear night.

During the past quarter of a century great advances have been made in the science of the sea, and the aspects and prospects of seafisheries research have undergone changes which encourage the hope that a combination of the work now carried on by hydrographers and biologists in most civilized countries on fundamental problems of the ocean may result in a more rational exploitation and administration of the fishing industries.

And yet even at your former Cardiff meeting thirty years ago there were at least three papers of oceanographic interest-one by Professor Osborne Reynolds on the action of waves and currents, another by Dr. H. R. Mill on seasonal variation in the temperature of lochs and estuaries, and the third by our honorary local secretary for the present meeting, Dr. Evans Hoyle, on a deep-sea-tow-net

1 From the address of the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science given at Cardiff on August 24, 1920.

capable of being opened and closed under water by the electric current.

It was a notable meeting in several respects, of which I shall merely mention two. In Section A, Sir Oliver Lodge gave the historic address in which he expounded the urgent need, in the interests of both science and the industries, of a national institution for the promotion of physical research on a large scale. Lodge's pregnant idea put forward at this Cardiff meeting, supported and still further elaborated by Sir Douglas Galton as President of the Association at Ipswich, has since borne notable fruit in the establishment and rapid development of the National Physical Laboratory. The other outstandng event of that meeting is that you then appointed a committee of eminent geologists and naturalists to consider a project for boring through a coral reef, and that led during following years to the successive expeditions to the atoll of Funafuti in the Central Pacific, the results of which, reported upon eventually by the Royal Society, were of great interest alike to geologists, biologists, and oceanographers.

ocean

Dr. Huggins, on taking the chair in 1891, remarked that it was over thirty years since the association had honored astronomy in the selection of its president. It might be said that the case of oceanography is harder, as the association has never had an ographer as president-and the association might well reply "Because until very recent years there has been no oceanographer to have." If astronomy is the oldest of the sciences, oceanography is probably the youngest. Depending as it does upon the methods and results of other sciences, it was not until our knowledge of physics, chemistry, and biology were relatively far advanced that it be came possible to apply that knowledge to the investigation and explanation of the phenomena of the ocean. No one man has done more to apply such knowledge derived from various other subjects and to organize the results as a definite branch of science than the late Sir John Murray, who may therefore be regarded as the founder of modern oceanography.

On

It is, to me, a matter of regret that Sir John Murray was never president of the British Association. I am revealing no secret when I tell you that he might have been. more than one occasion he was invited by the council to accept nomination and he declined for reasons that were good and commanded our respect. He felt that the necessary duties of this post would interfere with what he regarded as his primary life-work-oceanographical explorations already planned, and the last of which he actually carried out in the North Atlantic in 1912, when over seventy years of age, in the Norwegian steamer Michael Sars along with his friend Dr. Johan Hjort.

Any one considering the subject-matter of this new science must be struck by its wide range, overlapping as it does the borderlands of several other sciences and making use of their methods and facts in the solution of its problems. It is not only world-wide in its scope but extends beyond our globe and includes astronomical data in their relation to tidal and certain other oceanographical phenomena. No man in his work, or even thought, can attempt to cover the whole groundalthough Sir John Murray, in his remarkably comprehensive "Summary" volumes of the Challenger Expedition and other writings, went far towards doing so. He, in his combination of physicist, chemist, geologist and biologist, was the nearest approach we have had to an all-round oceanographer. The International Research Council probably acted wisely at the recent Brussels conference in recommending the institution of two international sections in our subject, the one of physical and the other of biological oceanography-although the two overlap and are so interdependent that no investigator on the one side can afford to neglect the other.

On the present occasion I must restrict myself almost wholly to the latter division of the subject, and be content, after brief reference to the founders and pioneers of our science, to outline a few of those investigations and problems which have appeared to me to

be of fundamental importance, of economic value, or of general interest.

Although the name oceanography was only given to this branch of science by Sir John Murray in 1880, and although according to that veteran oceanographer Mr. J. Y. Buchanan, the last surviving member of the civilian staff of the Challenger, the science of oceanography was born at sea on February 15, 1873, when, at the first official dredging station of the expedition, to the westward of Teneriffe, at 1,525 fathoms, everything that came up in the dredge was new and led to fundamental discoveries as to the deposits forming on the floor of the ocean, still it may be claimed that the foundations of the science were laid by various explorers of the ocean at much earlier dates. Aristotle, who took all knowledge for his province, was an early oceanographer on the shores of Asia Minor. When Pytheas passed between the pillars of Hercules into the unknown Atlantic and penetrated to British seas in the fourth century B.C., and brought back reports of Ultima Thule and of a sea to the north thick and sluggish like a jelly-fish, he may have been recording an early planktonic observation. But passing over all such and many other early records of phenomena of the sea, we come to surer ground in claiming, as founders of oceanography, Count Marsili, an early investigator of the Mediterranean, and that truly scientific navigator Captain James Cook, who sailed to the South Pacific on a transit of Venus expedition in 1769 with Sir Joseph Banks as naturalist, and by subsequently circumnavigating the South Sea about latitude 60° finally disproved the existence of a great southern continent; and Sir James Clerk Ross, who, with Sir Joseph Hooker as naturalist, first dredged the Antarctic in 1840.

The use of the naturalist's dredge (introduced by O. F. Müller, the Dane, in 1799) for exploring the sea-bottom was brought into prominence almost simultaneously in several countries of northwest Europe-by Henri Milne-Edwards in France in 1830, Michael Sars in Norway in 1835, and our own Edward Forbes in 1832.

The last mentioned genial and many-sided genius was a notable figure in several sections of the British Association from about 1836 onwards, and may fairly be claimed as a pioneer of oceanography. In 1839 he and his friend the anatomist, John Goodsir, were dredging in the Shetland Seas, with results which Forbes made known to the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham that summer, with such good effect that a "Dredging Committee" of the association was formed to continue the good work. Valuable reports on the discoveries of that committee appear in our volumes at intervals during the subsequent twenty-five years.

It has happened over and over again in history that the British Association, by means of one of its research committees, has led the way in some important research or development of science and has shown the government or an industry what wants doing and how it can be done. We may fairly claim that the British Association has inspired and fostered that exploration of British seas which through marine biological investigations and deep-sea expeditions has led on to modern oceanography. Edward Forbes and the British Association Dredging Committee, Wyville Thomson, Carpenter, Gwyn Jeffreys, Norman and other naturalists of the pre-Challenger days-all these men in the quarter-century from 1840 onwards worked under research committees of the British Association, bringing their results before successive meetings; and some of our older volumes enshrine classic reports on dredging by Forbes, McAndrew, Norman, Brady, Alder, and other notable naturalists of that day. These local researchers paved the way for the Challenger and other national deep-sea expeditions. Here, as in other cases, it required private enterprise to precede and stimulate government action.

It is probable that Forbes and his fellowworkers on this "Dredging Committee" in their marine explorations did not fully realize that they were opening up a most comprehensive and important department of knowledge. But it is also true that in all his expeditions

in the British seas from the Channel Islands to the Shetlands, in Norway, in the Mediterranean as far as the Egean Sea-his broad outlook on the problems of nature was that of the modern oceanographer, and he was the spiritual ancestor of men like Sir Wyville Thomson of the Challenger Expedition and Sir John Murray, whose accidental death a few years ago, while still in the midst of active work, was a grievous loss to this new and rapidly advancing science of the sea.

Forbes in these marine investigations worked at border-line problems, dealing for example with the relations of geology to zoology, and the effect of the past history of the land and sea upon the distribution of plants and animals at the present day, and in these respects he was an early oceanographer. For the essence of that new subject is that it also investigates border-line problems and is based upon and makes use of all the older fundamental sciences-physics, chemistry and biology-and shows for example how variations in the great ocean currents may account for the movements and abundance of the migratory fishes, and how periodic changes in the physicochemical characters of the sea, such as variations in the hydrogen-ion and hydroxyl-ion concentration, are correlated with the distribution at the different seasons of the all-important microscopic organisms that render our oceanic waters as prolific a source of food as the pastures of the land.

Another pioneer of the nineteenth century who, I sometimes think, has not yet received sufficient credit for his foresight and initiative, is Sir Wyville Thomson, whose name ought to go down through the ages as the leader of the scientific staff on the famous Challenger DeepSea Exploring Expedition. It is due chiefly to him and to his friend Dr. W. B. Carpenter that the British Government, through the influence of the Royal Society, was induced to place at the disposal of a committee of scientific experts first the small surveying steamer Lightning in 1868, and then the more efficient steamer Porcupine in the two succeeding years, for the purpose of exploring the deep water of the Atlantic from the Faroes in the north to Gibral

tar and beyond in the south, in the course of which expeditions they got successful hauls from the then unprecedented depth of 2,435 fathoms, nearly three statute miles.

It will be remembered that Edward Forbes, from his observations in the Mediterranean (an abnormal sea in some respects), regarded depths of over 300 fathoms as an azoic zone. It was the work of Wyville Thomson and his colleagues Carpenter and Gwyn Jeffreys on these successive dredging expeditions to prove conclusively what was beginning to be suspected by naturalists, that there is no azoic zone in the sea, but that abundant life belonging to many groups of animals extends down to the greatest depths of from four to five thousand fathoms nearly six statute miles from the surface.

These pioneering expeditions in the Lightning and Porcupine-the results of which are not even yet fully made known to sciencewere epoch-making, inasmuch as they not only opened up this new region to the systematic marine biologist, but gave glimpses of worldwide problems in connection with the physics, the chemistry and the biology of the sea which are only now being adequately investigated by the modern oceanographer. These results, which aroused intense interest amongst the leading scientific men of the time, were so rapidly surpassed and overshadowed by the still greater achievements of the Challenger and other national exploring expeditions that followed in the 'seventies and 'eighties of last century, that there is some danger of their real importance being lost sight of; but it ought never to be forgotten that they first demonstrated the abundance of life of a varied nature in depths formerly supposed to be azoic, and, moreover, that some of the new deep-sea animals obtained were related to extinct forms belonging to the Jurassic, Cretaceous and Tertiary periods.

It is interesting to recall that our association played its part in promoting the movement that led to the Challenger Expedition. Our general committee at the Edinburgh meeting of 1871 recommended that the president and council be authorized to cooperate with the